Orange lily tattoo on upper back

Nell was promised to Tom Ashby, the miller's boy, and her father would not hear of it. The mill owed money to half the county, and a man with debts does not give his only daughter to a boy who smells of flour and optimism. So Tom came to the lych gate every Sunday with his hat in his hands, and each week he left a single orange lily on the top step where Nell could find it after evensong. Freckled throats, bent backwards like dancers. Nobody in the parish could say where the bulbs had come from.

Her father found them one morning and cut every stem down with his pocketknife. Flowers don't pay rent, he said, and he swept the petals into the gutter himself. But a lily bulb is stubborn. It goes deeper than you think. The next June, the chapel steps were orange again, and the old man, who had been stubborn for seventy years, stood there looking at them a long while. Then he went indoors, took the ledger out of the drawer, and started doing sums that did not include a dowry.

So when you see the bride's bouquet, look for the orange ones. Look at the pollen on the cuffs of that gentleman by the door, the one who will not sit down. Nobody in this family has ever cut one down twice.